County given land for Hancock Park
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Dec 11, 1916: The Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors accepted the deed and plans for 32 acres of oil baron George Allan Hancock’s La Brea ranch for what The Times said would be “the most wonderful park in the world.”
The land to be called Hancock Park was “at the city’s western edge” and included “the world-famed asphaltum beds from which have been excavated the greatest collection of bones of animals and birds of the Pleistocene age ever found in science,” The Times said under the headline “ ‘Death-Trap of the Ages’ Is Made Property of Public.”
The site, which included the site known as the La Brea Tar Pits, “has a frontage of 1,900 feet on the north side of Wilshire Boulevard,” The Times said.
The park plan was designed by Paul G. Thiene and his associate Frank Lloyd Wright, the paper said.
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